A friend called me the other day with, “Do you have a minute? I just need to vent.” I’ve long accepted that I’m incurably nosy as hell, so I said, “I have more than a minute. Go for it.”

If you’ve ever started writing a story and felt it stall out at around the midpoint, the issue might be your inciting incident. The function of the inciting incident is to move your protagonist from a place of security into a place of massive insecurity.

One pattern authors are notorious for is called "moving the goal posts." 

That tends to look like setting a goal of, say,  publishing your first book. But once you publish it, rather than pausing to celebrate what you've done, appreciate the hard work you put into it, and feel gratitude for everyone who helped you along the way, you may instead say, "One book doesn't make me a real author. Time to start the next one."

Many authors I work with are independent authors, and even those who are trad published tend to be incredibly competent, self-contained people. It’s not a bad quality, but like anything, it can be overdone to the point of becoming a problem. 

I talk a lot about mental and emotional well-being for authors, and something I notice in responses is the idea that what I mean is you may someday reach a point where you feel good all the time and nothing affects you. Y’all probably already know this, but that’s not what well-being looks like, right? 

There is little that gives me more of a dopamine hit than putting together a system or process that produces maximum efficiency to a task I don’t enjoy doing. If I can automate something for my author business, I will. Set-it-and-forget-it is the dream, right?